The StartX Files: Between the Sheets with Siag

Seeing the Obvious

These were the words of my passenger as I swung the plane around over the man-made lake
below, looking out for other planes and just generally taking in the view.

These words, of course, were pitifully obvious to me. Having lived in Indiana nearly
all my life (except for three years in New Jersey that I don't want to discuss), pointing
out to me that the terrain is flat is akin to saying something something like "gee, the
Sun's really hot" while standing on the surface of Mercury.

In my rural centrism, however, I had forgotten that the rest of the world is not like
central Indiana. My passenger, a fellow parent from my daughter's school, was a subject of
Great Britain, where the land (I am told) is much more hilly. And populated. This was a
beginning flight for her, as she plans to start taking flying lessons of her own soon.

On that flight, I showed her some of the things the airplane could do, like steep
50-degree turns, and slowing down to fly at a mere 42 knots, stall horn twittering the
entire time.

She, a world traveler recently transplanted to the middle of the Midwest with her
family, managed to remind me of a few very important things. That Hoosier English and
British English really do need some sort of online translation Web site, for one thing.

The issue is perspectives. What seems completely normal for someone is often an alien
concept to someone else... until the new concept gets shoved in their face and they think
"oh, well, of course that's the way it has to be."

Lessons like this are something many of us have experienced time and time again. We try
something new, we see something new, but we don't think about all the impact this
something new will have--until we experience it for ourselves.

Change is a natural process. Change brings turmoil.

Obvious statements.

Things are changing around the kernel introduced by Linux Torvalds nearly 11 years
ago. We see evidence of this every day.

Nothing new here. But before we, as a community, get all in an uproar, we can remember
one thing: Linux is not one set of standards, Linux is diverse, Linux can move in whatever
direction (Server. Desktop. Embedded.) programmers can think of.